Quote Originally Posted by Zourin View Post
The damage on a tank is generally abysmal, as everything that *would* be damage is actually 'fake damage' ("threat").
I'm not sure how bad your damage is, but, at worst, I'm do half of what a DPS does. Oftentimes, I'm pushing upwards of 2/3rds, and, in the case of pug runs, oftentimes I'm tied or overcoming one or more DPS.

Damage is not a Tank class's priority beyond what is necessary to hold enemy attention and generally have a large enough HP pool to give the healer something to do.
If the only damage that a tank needed to provide was what is necessary to hold aggro, I would barely ever be attacking because I can generate enough enmity in the first 30 seconds to hold aggro off of all of the healers and DPS for the rest of the fight (for longer fights, I would just repeat my 30 sec starting rotation every 2 minutes or so). A tank that only attacks to generate sufficient enmity to keep aggro off of the rest of the group is doing their group a disservice.

Since we're talking about gearing here, yes, tanks shouldn't be prioritizing speed, crit, or det above parry or acc, but it's impossible to *only* have parry and acc itemization. You're going to *have* to have some degree of DPS itemization on your gear and, if you're not optimizing said DPS itemization, you're hurting your group. Even if you *don't* think tank DPS is all that high, it's still DPS, and it does actually add up. 10 more DPS on a tank and 10 more DPS on a DPS are the same exact thing.

Ignoring tank DPS just because it's a secondary functionality is just as bad as a DPS refusing to dodge survivable bad shit. It's that kind of mentality that leads to PLDs swapping over to become utterly horrible WARs.